Words We Carry

“I have been a great critic of myself for most of my life, and I was darned good at it, deflating my own ego without the help of anyone else.”

What do our shopping habits, high-heeled shoes, and big hair have to do with how we perceive ourselves? Do the slights we endured when we were young affect how we choose our relationships now?

D.G. takes us on a journey, unlocking the hurts of the past by identifying situations that hindered her own self-esteem. Her anecdotes and confessions demonstrate how the hurtful events in our lives linger and set the tone for how we value our own self-worth.

Words We Carry is a raw, personal accounting of how the author overcame the demons of low self-esteem with the determination to learn to love herself.

Read an Excerpt:

WHY IS SELF-ESTEEM SO IMPORTANT?

Women are often caught up in overvaluing the opinions of others, and I don’t pretend to be the exception. I’ve had my share of feeling mocked or judged, most especially in my younger years, when I was still searching for my identity, not yet secure in my own skin.

Ridicule can have long-lasting effects on our psyches, leaving us feeling inadequate or even unworthy of affection. The road toward internal happiness can be long, especially for those of us who’ve been taunted and teased from a young age.

We need to focus on our positive attributes and stop knocking ourselves down. We don’t have to allow others’ negative opinions to destroy our self-esteem. It’s much more rewarding for us to assess ourselves and, when we find things we aren’t content with, use our own power to better ourselves.

If we all look back at our childhoods, we’ll undoubtedly remember interactions or incidents that marked the beginnings of our insecurities. We might have been taunted for our looks, our habits, or even for our levels of intelligence. Looking back, we may recognize that the people who bullied and bruised our psyches made those remarks because they themselves were uncompassionate or jealous.

The power of words can lie very heavily on us. The old saying “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is a fallacy. I suspect that saying may have been first used as a comeback for something hurtful, but the truth is that words linger much longer than physical wounds. The damage done to our delicate egos, especially when we’re small, stays with us through the rest of our lives.